Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday June 21, 2012 @06:37PM
from the setting-the-tone dept.

derekmead writes "How, exactly, did Reddit get so big? Well, according to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it 'til they made it.' In a video for Udacity, Huffman describes how the first Redditors populated the site's content with tons of fake accounts. These days, with the site's users are wary of people using expendable accounts to try to seed their own content. But early on, Huffman said that using fake accounts driven by the founders was key to building the tone they wanted to the site. Early on the Reddit crew could shape the discourse of the site in the direction they wanted, and as the real user base grew, those standards held allowing the fake accounts to fade away."

Either way, who cares. If it hadn't taken off, they'd just end up as a bunch of weirdos talking to their multiple personalities. But it did, and the same tactic is used all the time - ever see a single dollar bill in a tip jar? Priming isn't new.

To anyone watching the parking lot for an extended amount of time to before deciding whether or not to shop there? I'm not sure that necessarily proves the principle is sound, it just proves that some people believe in the principle.

The first Costco was alongside a medium busy road, so lots of chances for people to see the lot day after day. But it was also in a somewhat dodgy somewhat rundown semi industrial area, so convincing those people that they were open

I've seen this a lot with year-round firework stores. Firework stores (aside from the 3 weeks before the 4th of July, and the 2 weeks before Christmas) are generally not busy places. The employees part right in front to make it seem that other people are there. Many people don't like to go into a store with nobody else inside.

That reminds me, my grandmother used to have a saying "It is bad luck to buy a coin bank without anything in it". In hindsight, I think she just liked tricking people into thinking they suckered her out of potential money. Usually it was just a few pennies or old washers she picked up.

That is actually not uncommon from the previous generation. My wife was told the same by her grandmother, and to this day always makes sure there is a penny or some change in a gift wallet, handbag, purse, or piggy bank.

You can buy a turnkey matchmaking site, complete with a few thousand profiles to get things going. These profiles will even send messages to your "real" users. You can toggle a switch to choose if your users have to pay to see the message, pay to reply, or whatever. There's nothing wrong with what reddit did, even if it went against their own terms of service. What's the phrase..."by any means necessary".

The Reddit groupthink is pretty overpowering. I wouldn't be surprised if there are still a horde of fake accounts designed to upvote politically favored things and downvote badthink articles right into the memory hole.

you went through the trouble of finding that post (which has zero replies and therefore doesn't indicate any discussion having taken place btw)... just so you can show off how little this interests you? hahahaha.... yeah, hackernews. *pats head*

With this new web 3.3 society it seems people get intensely focused on one site only to migrate to a newer site. Remember Digg? Remember Slashdot? Reddit will get replaced, it's only a matter of time. For me I'm going back to usenet and gopher.

You must have some kind of pre-release. I'm still on web 2.0.4-RC2. I think the 3.x series has more we- scale techonlogies like nosql and cloud. That will allow us to leverage javascript on every teir to make a thicker thin client with rich apps using HTML6 technology with XML for unstructured social tags. This is perfect for enterprise.

Digg was destroyed by its owner. Slashdot and Reddit survive by... well doing nothing. How long did Slashdot go with it's appalling mess of code? And the moment they tried to clean things up including the interface... nothing but complaints! Sometimes if it ain't broke don't fix it (except secretly behind the scenes). Hell, I live in France where fax is still more respected than email.

The only reason Slashdot is dying is dilution. Nobody wants to watch TV, we don't have time, and the previous poor quality of submissions and editing was border-line acceptable as it served as a trigger-point for a lively comments thread but the pollution of slashvertisement by timothy etc makes reading bitching threads tiresome.

Getting momentum is tough. I don't think Slashdot or Reddit are going anywhere for now. However as the spectacular demise of Digg shows, things can change pretty quickly.

Digg tried to kill themselves four times. They just got better at it as they went along. Part of their charm was their noobishness. They were known for it. Periodically re-engineering the discussion system to make it worse, presumably to make their noob members feel at home. It was weird and low rent and they finally put themselves out of their misery.

Still today, if you pay attention, you can tell that the tone of the site is maintained by editorial up/down voting. I know, because my tone they hate and it consistently gets one downvote. Not a lot, just the two needed to make it negative. Then if people reply to me, that discussion is not manipulated, but that comment that started my thread sticks with the negative one. It happens over and over.
Regular folks can swoop in and pour more ups or downs, but more often than not, there is a "first psas" (ha ha First!) that zooms through right away and keeps the 'jerk tone pristine. Used to be that way on Slashdot too, you can tell by how quickly the needle moves to where it "wants" to be. I don't know any more, I don't pay attention or post.

I don't mind stuff getting voted down, any reader worth their salt reads at -1 (or highlights text on HN) anyway. But hellbanning for fuck all? Slowbanning for even less, for basically "not cheering instantly" --- wow haha. I'm a potty mouth, and I can see how my first accounts were expelled, but seriously, from then on I tried to behave better, but just for disagreeing or pointing out hypocrisy --- BAM, slowban, then log out and you realize your posts don't even show up for anyone. It's so petty and stupid it's hilarious. "Spammers and trolls" my ass -- that's a spineless echo chamber if I've ever seen one. And they even call themselves hacker news of all things.

Oh well, fuck these clowns. It kinda made me realize how good slashdot is all over again (you can say what you want about it, but at least it's not squeamish and deceptive); I'm just "ranting" about it here because well, I can't do it there:P

Augh, I'm out of mod points, so everybody look at this reply and mentally add +1 Insightful. Everybody should shut the fuck up about 10 times a day and ponder quietly to themselves "Maybe I'm just an asshole?" Do not continue posting on the Internet until you can demonstrate to yourself (to at least 2 sig figs) that you are not.

It's one thing to downmod comments because they're not constructive towards the discussion. It's altogether another thing to downmod individuals completely (though it happens all the time, in the form of credibility in real life, and karma on/.).

Still, I expect even trolls have interesting things to say once in a while.

I know, because my tone they hate and it consistently gets one downvote. Not a lot, just the two needed to make it negative . . . . more often than not, there is a "first psas" (ha ha First!) that zooms through right away and keeps the 'jerk tone pristine.

I'm curious: how would you characterize your "tone"? Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but it sounds like you're describing your own tone as that of a jerk.

If that's the case, it just sounds like effective & efficient modding.

you did read it wrong:) but plenty of people do think i'm a jerk, and plenty of people don't.

I wrote 'jerk with an apostrophe as a shortening of circlejerk, meaning the site likes its own circlejerk tone, and tries to maintain it.

They downvote me because of the following: I read sites like these for learning and for humor. Most of the time, i just lurk, or really, just read along enjoying the jokes, learning here or there, and ignoring the noise. If I agree with what's being said, why comment, right? H

Well I can think of a few simpler explanations for your experience than your claim, but I believe that you'd just find them insulting and it would shut down this exchange. So in the hope of being constructive, I will suggest an slight tweak to your approach. Try this for a week or so, and if you still run into the immediate -1 mods. If you do? Well there goes my theory, maybe you're onto something. But if you find that the downvotes disappear (as I suspect they will), well I'll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

(W)hen somebody says something that is both wrong/uneducated, and I can tell it's emotional, bigoted, and antithetical and intolerant of things I believe in, then I get motivated to set the record straight in a way that "does not suffer fools"

It's this shit right here that sounds to me like prime downvote bait. Here's the suggestion: next time you see something both wrong/uneducated, something that is emotional, bigoted, antithetical, and intolerant of the things you believe in, try a minor variation on your approach to setting the record straight. No need to "suffer fools" as you put it, but just stick to disputing the something they posted. Do not --no matter how strongly a negative reaction it provokes in you-- belittle, embarrass, or try insult the *person*, even by implication (such as "only idiots would think that.") Whatever you own conclusions about the person might be, don't post them. Just disagree --as vehemently as you prefer-- and explain why you disagree.

Attack the argument, not the person -- even if they're attacking others and/or you. It can be a subtle distinction, but this is the difference between civilized-but-lively debate and ego-wanking.

I was trying to be polite, but I suppose I'll have to be blunt. Your description leaves a much more plausible explanation than your claim that a group of editors tracks every new post for some proper "tone" that you occasionally are just too rebellious to match.

It seems much, *much* more likely to me that instead, you occasionally come off like a self-righteous, unbearably narcissistic ass who grossly overestimates his own cleverness and the value of his opinion, and whose comments, once modded to -1, simply aren't worth wasting any time nor effort moderating further. In other words, people --occasionally-- simply aren't that interested in bothering with what you have to say on those occasions when you feel justified in acting out.

I can't imagine why a jagoff like you gets downvoted on Reddit. Oh wait, I can, it's because you take a lot of text and time to say a lot of bullpucky amounting to nothing of real value. The fact that you got modded up for posting conspiratorial drivel is kind of worrying, but I guess a lot of people here on/. really do want to think they're being silenced by "the man", whoever or whatever "the man" may be for a particular website. Honestly, you're not nearly as important to the people that run the site o

People who post as you claim to are prime candidates for me to downvote here. I can't imagine that reddit is any different. Trying to work in personal insults or assuming the OP is a fool is a great way to come across as offensive.

A lot of dumb people think they're pretty smart. The number of individuals in the group does not have to be large for at least one to be smarter than you (you could generalize from the birthday paradox).

It is not a measure of intelligence to 'put fools in their place'. It is wrestling with a pig. When you can, stick to facts. When you don't have facts, stick to logic. When the person you're arguing with has a fundamentally different view of truth as you (e.g. skepticism vs religion), appeal to emotion. Conn

“You’re (white people) on the endangered list. And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving. In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around.” – Tim Wise, “anti-racist activist

Wouldn't what they did constitute fraud and manipulation and put them in an actionable position from their advertisers and/or actual human users, if not criminal in some locales? It's wholly unethical at best and I have been asked to create fake accounts and posts by some of my web clients and have told them so. That's just so wrong on so many levels.

I'm sorry, but I'm not gonna buy that from anyone who isn't a lawyer, and that might be true where you live but might not in every locale. If you pretend to be something else for monetary gain with the express purpose of manipulation, that's fraud. Not acting, fraud. Something tells me this admission by the co-founder may come back to bite him and Reddit. I know I will never go there after this. BTW, how do you separate fake account posts and non-fake posts from ads when they appear on the same page? I've b

A computer operating system requires a bootstrapper to load it into memory before it can run.An engine on an automobile or aircraft requires rotation by an external source before it can power itself.A business requires capital before it can generate its own.A social media site requires 'social media' before it can launch.

The general population of redditors and their self-masturbatory attention whoring has become annoying enough that I don't bother any more. I used to waste hours a day there, but the signal/noise ratio has turned decidedly flamboyant hipster. The resulting Imgur postings each day, however, are still worth watching, so I just subscribe to those feeds. Funny/Sexy/Nerdy content without the self-pleasuring drivel. Much better way to 'reddit'.

In the course of developing a large, scalable, social networking application, one aspect of this is 'Stress Testing', in which, common sense dictates that you need to set-up a staging environment with fake users, and scripts (aka: bots) that act as users interacting with the system.

The fact that they used this practice in production to get attention or mislead and entice real people to use their system, is not that surprising, or un-common. The real news here is that the majority of reddit users are, and ha

In other words, the Golden Era of Reddit where there was supposedly more intelectual discussions, content and the lack to rage comics and cat pictures was all fake? Now that Reddit has actual users it's just a shit as 4chan?

Ever notice some of the common passwords revealed in the password hacks are kind of not that common. Why would 40 accounts have the password Michael and another 40 accounts have the password Jordon? Fake accounts with common passwords duh.

I'd say it's more the case of explaining why redditors remember the earliest years containing coherent and knowledgable discussion. You had a focussed audience with a vested interest in getting quality discussion going. When the great unwashed outnumber these quality submissions you get a link aggregator that thinks it's a forum, where every second post is in the form of a badly phrased meme.

I'd like to say I've never been to reddit, but that's no longer true: I quite enjoyed Mr. Skullhead's AMA thread (Skullhead being one of the creators of KoL; I only went to reddit, and for that matter, only learned what "AMA" meant, because Skully announced it to the whole kingdom that he was doing one.)

Haven't been back since, though. Anyway, since when is requesting that sentences be grammatical English, a sign of pomposity? (Pedantry perhaps. Though, I think of myself as a staunch descriptivist!)

People do it all the time, but from the perspective of Blizzard's bottom-line it isn't a huge deal. That person still pays for each of the accounts, so the only real difference is that unlike with 5 people (each with one account), all 5 accounts could disappear at once if the person quits. That is a downside, but not enough that it merits bothering much with, imo.

Multi-boxing has always been common thing in MMOs, for some people if they can justify $14.99 a month for the majority of your entertainment $44.97 doesn't seem to bad ever. It is becoming even more common now that the F2P model is really taking off the barrier to entry is lower to do so.

Yeah. These days the site is basically run by users who managed to get in early enough and become well-know enough that they got moderator positions on the default subreddits - and they run a horde of fake accounts so the users don't have to. Seriously, one of the most prolific moderators (Karmanaut) was actually caught posting replies to his own comments with a sockpuppet to make it look like people agreed with him because he later accidentally sent someone a message from the wrong account.

The worst case of this was the guy that owned r/jailbait and most of the other creepy pedophile shit. He had a close enough relationship with the site admins that they were very much complicit in that activity continuing as long as it did. Dude had a ton of sockpuppets that he would use to upvote his own posts and bury anyone that criticized him. Reddit groupthink being what it is (which is very much a product of how the site is structured, not related to TFA), he had a pretty significant vocal minority of